ABSTRACT
Critics sympathetic to the symbolists were also faced with the problem of evaluating artists who had conflicting aims but whose work they continued to admire. Aurier considers him at best a mediocre sociological historian, who, in the end, is not concerned with either aesthetics or art criticism, and whose influence has been disastrous. Most of it is given over to an attack on the 'scientific' criticism of Taine, and his co-practitioners of the method, Sainte-Beuve and Emile Hennequin. The vocabulary is borrowed from the theories of symbolist poetry, but the application of those theories to the peculiar conditions of painting is rarely spelled out. Feneon was the indispensable critic of one aspect of symbolist painting, but through the deliberate restrictions of his taste and interest, he refused the larger role he might have played. Felix Feneon and Georges-Albert Aurier were not quite the only critics of the new tendency.
